Millions more can scramble for shots
Expect a wait: Supply doesn’t fill demand as age limit drops
Bay Area counties have a message for hundreds of thousands of 50 to 64yearolds who become eligible for a coronavirus vaccination as of Thursday: Stay patient.
“We just don’t have the supply right now,” said Lynda Hopkins, chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, which sent a letter over the weekend begging state health officials for more vaccine. Hopkins told the state that the county could vaccinate 40,000 people each week, but has been getting only 15,000 doses a week — and fewer than 13,000 this week.
“We’re going to be in a
situation where demand greatly exceeds supply,” she said at a news briefing Monday during which Dr. Urmila Shende, the county’s vaccine chief, suggested that newly eligible people voluntarily continue to wait for their shots if they are healthy enough to do so.
Public health officials across the Bay Area and California have similar concerns now that Gov. Gavin Newsom has opened eligibility for the lifesaving inoculations to people 50 and over beginning Thursday, and to everyone else as young as 16 on April 15. It could take weeks for vaccine supply, which federal officials vow is coming soon, to catch up to demand.
California has 7.2 million people in the 50to64 age group, 17% of whom are fully vaccinated because of their jobs or health status, reports the California Department of Public Health. That leaves nearly 6 million people in the group who still need one or both shots.
There’s also an urgency to vaccinate everyone, counties say, because even more dangerous coronavirus strains, including the virulent Brazilian variety, have reached the Bay Area.
“Except we don’t have the vaccine,” Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County’s vaccine officer, said at a news briefing last week. He said the county has 400,000 people aged 50 to 64, and the ability to vaccinate 200,000 each week. But with just 58,000 doses coming in weekly from the state — not counting thousands of doses that go to Kaiser — the county has been able to vaccinate only a third of the eligible people.
And that was before eligibility was set to swell like a tidal wave with the expanded age criteria.
At that point, “if we don’t have enough vaccine supply, it’s going to be pandemonium at the sites,” said Peter Shih, in charge of vaccinations for the San Mateo County Health Department.
In San Francisco, the mass vaccination site at City College of San Francisco was celebrating Thursday’s expanded eligibility quietly: It was closed.
“We’re not open till Friday because we don’t have any vaccine,” said Kim Murphy, operations director for the site, which is run by UCSF.
“I’m extremely concerned,” said Tina Valentine, 57, an events producer in San Francisco who sometimes has to work with others in person. “I’m really concerned that I will get shut out, and as soon as April 1 hits, the system will be flooded with requests and there will not be enough vaccine available.”
Her husband, Mark Valentine, 59, had no problem finding an appointment for Friday through the Kaiser site. But when Tina tried, it said she wasn’t eligible — possibly because Kaiser does not have enough vaccine for even the currently eligible groups. In Northern California, Kaiser has more than 900,000 members age 50 to 64, and more than 2 million members 16 to 49, but says it gets only 55,000 to 75,000 vaccine doses each week.
“I’m vexed and perplexed by the system,” Tina Valentine said. “And annoyed that our local and national governments haven’t been able to come up with something better and more consistent. It seems random.”
Since December, California has slowly expanded the groups of people eligible for the vaccine. Health care providers were first, followed by other essential workers, people over 75, then 65, and this month, younger people with health conditions that make them especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. But as a movement to recall Newsom has gained ground — fueled by Republicans and others impatient to reopen California’s economy — the governor has stepped up vaccine eligibility.
In what could be a preview of what’s to unfold statewide over the coming weeks, Contra Costa County — which on Tuesday became the first Bay Area county to expand eligibility to everyone — said it will probably take three to four weeks to get through the backlog of people seeking appointments. About 375,000 people in the county became newly eligible Tuesday, far exceeding the 20,000 open appointment slots.
Overnight, 30,000 people in the county went online to request appointments, county officials said Wednesday.
State officials and the Biden administration have promised that vaccines will soon become plentiful, but it hasn’t happened yet.
“Every city, county and state has more capacity to administer vaccines than there is supply,” said Darrel Ng, spokesman for the state’s COVID19 Vaccine Task Force.
Ng said the problem rests with manufacturers that haven’t produced enough vaccine — but he said that is changing.
“California has been allocated 2.4 million doses next week, an increase of 300,000 from this week,” he said. By contrast, the state a month ago was getting just 1.5 million doses each week, he said.
Napa County, however, is getting fewer vaccine doses than in prior weeks, said county spokeswoman Janet Upton.
San Francisco’s COVID Command Center said that vaccine coming into San Francisco is “limited, inconsistent and unpredictable.” Because of that, and because many of the neediest people still need to get vaccinated, as do people needing a second dose, the center warned that newly eligible people “may experience difficulty securing their first vaccine appointment in the coming weeks.”
As well, not everyone in the older and more vulnerable groups has yet been vaccinated. In Marin County, for example, just 68% of people over 65 are fully vaccinated, and 13% are halfway there, still needing a second dose of the twodose Moderna or Pfizer regimen, the county reported.
In the last couple of weeks, a handful of counties across the state — including Contra Costa and Solano in the Bay Area — began expanding eligibility early to people as young as 50. Within 24 hours of that expansion at John Muir Health in Contra Costa County, 90% of its open appointments were snapped up, said Ben Drew, a John Muir spokesman.
So will the next two weeks give enough time to vaccinate the newly eligible people before socalled open season starts, with everyone over 16 eligible, on April 15?
“That’s a crystal ball question,” said Shende of Sonoma County. “It really depends on vaccine supply, over which we have no idea or no control.”
It will also depend on how many people choose to get vaccinated, and whether shots will be made more accessible to people who don’t have internet access, time or transportation to get to vaccination sites that in many places are largely relying on online booking. National polls show that an increasing proportion of Americans want to get vaccinated, but there will likely be holdouts.
In Butte County, where eligibility was extended Monday to everyone 16 and over, it’s not clear if there will be enough supply because that depends on how many of the newly eligible want vaccinations, said county health director Danette York. It may turn out that younger people are not as eager as older people, and some people may want to hold out for when more of the oneshot Johnson & Johnson vaccine becomes available.
“There’s no way of telling until we open it up and see what kind of response we get,” York said. “It seems like there’s a couple things maybe going on. One is the younger the group gets, the less of them want the vaccine, which is fine. It’s everyone’s personal choice . ... The other thing I’m concerned about is people are waiting until we have more of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available because it’s a single dose.”